The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Maniye shrugged. Her words were spent now. She could only wait to see if they had been enough.

  ‘There is some of me in you,’ Hyena mused, eyeing the Champion. ‘Is it enough to make you pass as mine? For this land is mine, now. Mine until they return to contest it, if they ever will.’ She sniffed at Maniye, pushing at her gently. ‘There is a little in your scent, perhaps. Perhaps it is my daughter, who ran with you once.’

  ‘Shyri,’ Maniye acknowledged.

  ‘Such a wayward child,’ the Hyena acknowledged. ‘But mine, still, even when she does foolish things like make friends with foreigners and shed her blood for them. For the blood she has shed, for the hurts she has endured, for the joy you have given her, I let you pass, little wolf-cat. I give you safe passage to the end of the world. Much happiness may you have of it.’

  * * *

  Loud Thunder had his axe in hand, but nobody to use it on. He was the Warbringer, but the war was happening elsewhere. At his back were the fires of the camp, and the great song of the ritual rose up towards the sky – where he hoped some divine ears heard it. At his front . . .

  The fight against the Plague had been going on all morning. The enemy had been far away across the Plains, too distant to see. Bands of the swifter warriors had set out at dawn, hoping to find the advancing warriors and slow them, even just a little. Thunder knew this, and he knew who had succeeded and who had failed. Somehow, word always got to him. Often it was by youths who had only just got their souls – Heron and Vulture boys and girls on clumsy wings. At other times it was the Horse, galloping up to him to deliver a breathless message before they Stepped and were off once more.

  Thunder had tried to keep a picture in his head, of all the things they told him, but he kept losing his grip on them. Then Esumit the Serpent priestess had come to him, as though conjured by his mounting confusion. She had begun to draw maps in the dirt, showing who was where and how far the Plague Warriors had got, and she had made little pictures on the flat sheets the southerners made, which recorded the words each of the scouts delivered. It was as though she had become Loud Thunder’s memory, freeing his mind up just when it would have choked to a halt with chewing over information.

  The picture that she drew was not encouraging, though. Warbands were constantly striking against the Plague warriors, Stepped and unstepped, with spear, with arrow, with trickery. Each won a few heartbeats, no more. Many paid a savage price for it, for the Plague Men were killing anything that moved, now. They must understand that the whole world was against them, and if it had been Loud Thunder at their head he would have turned around and gone home. Their reaction was instead to kill it all, burn it all, tramp everything of this world beneath their feet, blot out the sky with their wings until there was nothing left that was not theirs. Thunder trembled at the thought of their belief in themselves, which eclipsed any other view of the world.

  Asman was out there fighting. Perhaps the next messenger would swoop down and proclaim his death. Plenty of others Thunder could name were hazarding their lives against the darts and the Terror. And he was here, hearing of their courage and sending them to die.

  Two Heads Talking was at his elbow then, shading his eyes. ‘I see . . . smoke? Dust?’ the Coyote said, voice shaking just a little.

  Thunder squinted at the horizon. There was a storm there, the air dark as though a shadow came that the sun could not dispel.

  ‘Not dust,’ he said. ‘Them.’ He watched the cloud lift and then drop, thinking of starlings or schooling fish. The abrupt understanding came to him that a whole double-handful of the Plague Men had just dropped down behind a force of the Boar and would be killing them, piercing them with their darts until the Terror took hold.

  ‘The Tiger must act now,’ he said. It was not meant as an order but a young Heron girl within earshot took it as one and was off, spreading ungainly new-found wings and Stepping into the sky.

  ‘More coming,’ Two Heads Talking said through tight lips, and Loud Thunder saw that all their skirmishing, all their warbands, would not keep this enemy from their hearth.

  It was only a handful that overflew the camp, and one of the Bat rose up shrieking to drive them away, but they would have seen. For a moment Thunder wondered what they could actually have understood of the sight. After all, surely the whole problem with the Plague People was that they were inimical to true humans. They did things differently and could not see any other way than theirs. But then Thunder thought of the Plague priest with his white eyes. That one would know. Galethea’s testimony had been clear about that. In all the enemy, that one man knew exactly what the true people were and wanted them wiped from the world to cover sins remembered only in the stories of the true people, which told that the Plague had exterminated those who were unlike them in that place they once all called home.

  ‘Who do we have left?’ Again just an internal question that found his tongue, but Esumit was there with her little pictures telling him precisely who was still with the camp. They had River Lord spears, they had Plains Dog archers and the warband of the Many Mouths. Thunder sent word that they must stay close and be ready to fight.

  In the moments when his attention had been off them, the army of the Plague People seemed to have covered half the ground towards the camp. Now there was a fierce skirmish as Boar and Tiger and some of the Estuary warbands tried to slow them again, striking from the long grass, loosing poison arrows, charging tusk-first into the metal rain of the darts. Thunder shuddered, stabbed by guilt because he knew that should be his charge.

  Then Esumit gasped once and fell, writhing about a bloody tear across her breasts, and a score of Plague Men were dropping down on him. They saw the camp, Thunder’s mind nagged at him even as he Stepped. They saw the ritual, but they saw the war leader too.

  Two Heads Talking had fled instantly, because that was the wisdom of Coyote. Thunder had no such luxury, shackled as he was to leading. Pale, hollow men in armour were dropping down all around him, sending death at anything they could see, and he was the biggest target there. One came to earth incautiously close and Thunder bellowed and swatted the creature, feeling iron armour crumple, and bones and flesh too. They were all around him, and for a moment the Terror had him by the scruff of the neck, shaking him like a dog with a rat. As if summoned by the image, though, his real dogs were there – Yoff, Yaff and Husker came bounding to his aid, surely Two Heads had set them loose. Two leapt on a Plague Man at Thunder’s back and bore him down, snarling and bloody-muzzled. Husker, the youngest and the biggest, just slammed into a Plague Man the way he would when greeting Loud Thunder – save that Thunder was twice the size of these empty monsters and the victim was thrown from his feet, weapon spinning from his hands.

  Thunder lumbered forwards, feeling darts pluck at his hide, feeling one shot rip a shallow line of pain down his flank. He kept moving, the Terror always at his heels, scattering the enemy like handfuls of corn, getting his claws and teeth into any too slow to avoid him. He had heartbeats to live. He was too slow; they were too deadly.

  Then there were Plains Dogs all around him, some band of them summoned by the fighting. They came Stepped and snarling and abruptly the Plague People had more to worry about than just a slow bear and a few dogs. The trap that was closing on Loud Thunder splintered into fierce close fighting, the Plague Men with their iron swords against the bronze axes and spears of the Plainsfolk. Thunder thought the enemy would fly then, but for hollow things they lacked no courage, standing their ground and killing with blade’s edge, or with handfuls of fire conjured from nowhere.

  Thunder took a blade in the side, the force of the thrust slowing to nothing in the bear’s dense muscles. Brief flames washed over him and charred his pelt, and still the enemy skipped out of his reach, each one trying to get clear enough to kill him with their darts. Then half a dozen of the Plains Dogs were cut down in a single breath, and the Terror stooped on them all, ready to rip their minds from them.

  Something else stoop
ed too, putting them all within its great shadow. Yellow Claw blackened the sky as he fell on them, the vast-winged Eagle Champion of the Eyrie. His talons seized one Plague Man about the neck and almost wrenched his head away, and then he had Stepped to get his leaf-bladed knives into another, leaping up on the creature’s shoulders to plunge them down past the edge of its armour. There were more Eyriemen wheeling overhead, and perhaps it was having their sky threatened that finally broke the Plague Warriors’ nerve because they were fleeing, leaping up into the air and zig-zagging away, followed by arrows and stones.

  Yellow Claw regarded Loud Thunder with distaste, as though he had not realized whose life he might save by indulging his bloodlust. Then he nodded once, full of a reminder of matters between them yet unresolved, and knocked half the Plains Dogs off their feet when his wings clapped down to lift him away.

  Husker was dead and Yoff was scorched and limping, whimpering with pain beyond any healer’s ability to help. Where Esumit had lain was a patch of bloody ground, but neither human nor snake body was to be seen. Plenty of the Plains Dogs had met their end too, and just to keep breath in Thunder’s lump of a body. He felt sick of it all.

  Two Heads Talking crept back then, a little shamefaced for all that he had been rallying help the while. He was about to say something, some comforting platitude perhaps, when the words died on his lips. Thunder followed his gaze – not only was the enemy on the ground dangerously close now, but they had brought their great weapon, of course they had. Sailing impossibly above them, already in advance of the skirmishing below, came the Plague Ship towards the camp.

  ‘Well, we knew it would be like this,’ Two Heads said, and his voice shook more than a little now.

  All around them, every warrior who could Step to a pair of wings was taking to the air. The Hawk warriors of Yellow Claw were already aloft and now they were joined by Heron and Vulture and the lean, alien people of the Bat Society, and birds of a half-dozen small tribes from the Plains and the River. They had held back for this very moment. They were pitifully few compared to those who could fight on the ground, but to them fell the worst of all tasks. The floating monster of the enemy was coming, high beyond arrow-reach, growing to itself as it prepared to unleash scouring fire on all beneath it. All those who could take the fight skywards must do so.

  And in the wake of that great tumult of wings came one more pair. After all the warriors had set off towards the approaching Plague Ship, one more hawk flurried overhead. Thunder felt his heart clench at the sight, knowing who it must be.

  * * *

  Maniye had travelled the Godsland more than once. Always before, the journey had been a symbolic thing, not distance but an attempt to find something within herself. This time was different. She was looking for something outside herself, outside the domain of the gods. And so she was lost.

  She had taken the paths uphill, trusting that if she could just get high enough then the finer details of Hesprec’s plan – such as how it could possibly be accomplished – would fall into place. The land around her seemed to crumple and twist even as she walked it. Canyon after canyon, ravine after ravine, sometimes riding the Champion’s broad back, sometimes walking beside it as it negotiated narrow trails, hard rock to one side, empty air to the other. And always Galethea behind her like her own ghost arrived premature, her whispery voice coming and going with complaints of ‘It hurts,’ and demands to know what they were searching for.

  ‘Where are your gods?’ the Pale Shadow breathed, and Maniye wondered what she could possibly expect. Did she think she could stand before the Wolf or the Lion and beg souls for her people? The merest breath of a god would scatter her like spider-threads across a meadow.

  Maniye had no answers for her, anyway. She could feel the gods’ closeness – Hesprec’s great ritual had done that much, at least – but they were out of sight, beyond the next rock, over the next ridge. And they would not go where Maniye needed to go. She would be on her own there.

  Then at last the accusation came from behind her. ‘You’re lost, aren’t you? You don’t know.’

  She turned, seeing Galethea glimmer and wane, ghostly arms clutched around herself as though trying to hold her filmy substance in. The pale woman’s eyes were bitter. ‘I’m dying. You’ve dragged me here where I don’t belong, and for nothing. You don’t know where to go. And my people . . .’ Maniye braced herself for another recital of the Pale Shadow’s fate, but then something changed in Galethea’s face and she folded, sitting down and hunching over phantom pain. ‘All our people,’ she corrected herself, and the blame went from her face. ‘Your people will die if we fail. We all will. So you have a plan. You must do. Even a desperate one. Please, tell me what can I do. I’ve come this far. I’ve come here, where I should never have been. Help me, Many Tracks.’

  Maniye knelt by her, wondering if this access of humanity meant that there was some germ of soul in the creature after all. Or was it always there, and I never noticed until now? ‘I need you to help me,’ she said. ‘Look above us, Pale Shadow.’

  The angry darting stars of the Godsland – so far away no matter how high they climbed – seemed to dance deep within Galethea’s eyes.

  ‘We need to reach them,’ Maniye explained. ‘There is a path to them, up this mountain,’ or so I hope, because all’s lost if this cannot be done. ‘Do you not feel some call from them? Do you not hear a voice?’ Hesprec had coached her, in this, but she found she had no belief in it. Hesprec could not have seen what an echo of a thing Galethea would be in the Godsland. Surely there was nothing to her that could hear any call at all.

  And yet a spectral breeze seemed to stir the filaments of the pale woman’s body, running through her just once and leaving the world changed behind it.

  ‘I . . . hear,’ she murmured. Her eyes brimmed with insubstantial tears. ‘I hear something beautiful.’

  Maniye had no doubt that if that call came to her own ears it would give her nightmares forever, but she and the Pale Shadow were very different things.

  ‘Can you lead the way?’ she asked, as gently as she could.

  Galethea stood, briefly more real, filled with purpose. ‘There is a sound, like the singing of wind-harps, like threads drawn taut.’ She stared up at the mobile sky and Maniye wondered what she saw there – what she saw of the Godsland at all. Was it different, in her mind? Reversed so that the terrible was wonderful, the beautiful become a thing of fear?

  ‘Take us to them,’ she urged Galethea, and for a moment she thought it would be as easy as that. The Pale Shadow woman would play her part, lead her unerringly to where she needed to go, and then, and then . . . Except even Hesprec had not planned for ‘and then’ beyond the getting there. Maniye would have to take what spoor she found and hunt it any way she could.

  But Galethea was not leading her anywhere. She wanted to, plainly. She started and stopped, started and stopped, sometimes thwarted by the rising rock walls, the brittle sharpness of jagged stones, other times by nothing Maniye could see. Now the song was in her, she was desperate to play her part, but the Godsland hated her. It was not touched by her magic, or perhaps that magic had stayed behind with her body. She heard the song but had no way to reach it, and in frustration she tugged at her fair hair and tried to tear her face with her nails, save that neither had enough substance.

  ‘It is there,’ she spat out. ‘Right there, but I can’t . . .’ She reached out fingers for the stars and they seemed to gather about her, as anxious for the union as she, but that was a mere trick of perspective. They were the stars, and as far away as ever.

  At last the Pale Shadow woman collapsed back down, holding herself again, giving out a cracked, desperate cry. She was weeping, a real woman’s bitter anger at being so powerless.

  Kneeling beside Galethea, all the sounds in the world seemed to hush for a moment before resuming. She felt at her back the presence of Hesprec, and through her all the many rituals and stories, dances and songs of the priests and their votar
ies. Yet, for a moment, they had lessened and become further away.

  ‘Galethea, please,’ she said. ‘We have no time.’ She could picture the storm of the Plague army tearing through the camp, their Terror blotting out the sun like wings.

  ‘I have no time,’ the pale woman whispered. Her faint hands found Maniye’s. ‘I wanted so much. I came so far. It hurts, Many Tracks. It hurts more and more.’

  There was a high giggle, from so close that Maniye could have reached out and touched the newcomer, grabbed her and shaken her. Instead she just stared. A girl had come to them, scarcely more than a child. She had sat to make a circle of the three of them and was staring at Galethea. Her lean Coyote features were unbearably familiar to Maniye, a face she had thought never to see again.

  ‘How are you here?’ she demanded. ‘Sathewe?’

  The Coyote girl looked at her blankly. ‘What name is that? Is it mine?’

  ‘Sathewe, I am Many Tracks. You know me.’

  But she didn’t, or not enough. A brief shadow passed behind her eyes but then was gone, and back came the infuriating grin that had always meant trouble.

  For a moment Maniye wondered if all whom the Terror had taken came to the Godsland like this, in their human shapes. But Sathewe-the-coyote lived still – was even now nestled in Maniye’s lap back in the human world. And they had met no others, none of the multitudes the Plague People had destroyed by their very presence.

  But Sathewe and fear had always had a strange relationship. The girl had always been strange, no common sense at all and up for whatever mad scheme Feeds on Dreams could conceive. When the trap closed on her tail yet again she would yelp, but she would never remember the pain. The Terror had taken her, but perhaps something of the girl she had been had clung on here in the Godsland, following her coyote body as it trotted at Maniye’s heels.

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’ Sathewe asked, passing a hand through Galethea’s substance without hesitation.

  ‘Many things,’ Maniye said flatly. ‘But she hears a song I cannot, and she needs to reach it.’ In the back of her mind were all the stories people told – the ones the Wolf priests disapproved of, where Coyote’s cunning and not Wolf ’s strength was lauded. Coyote was an uncertain ally, but often the only one in desperate times. Coyote was the great clever coward who went where no other god would dare.